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Monday, February 15, 2016

Part of my Extreme Ezra coverage

Across all of my blogs you'll find that I've been writing about Ezra Pound. The poet he was excites me. His gift for hearing words and translating from various foreign language to fit the work, was enormous. Few other poets have come close to this. The racist he was, however, destroys my appreciation for the man. His abandonment of his Anti-Semitism late in life helps, a bit. He was a wildly talented, grandiose, thinker. He was also naive, generous and attached to ideas that were to better humanity. Sadly, he didn't see the cost of those ideas, as Fascism in practice was always brutal, and always about power. He saw it about fairness and as a way to utilize resources to empower the state. It might, but at the cost of liberty, happiness, freedom, rights...

"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite."

"Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place "

"AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN."

"One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns."